Chapter 10: A question of proportions

10) A question of proportions

Well, actually what was noticed by different people at the end of the questionnaire was the major importance of the proportions. As soon as you make a cake or adapt to a situation, you have to weigh the right amount of ingredients to go together with other ingredients that are already in place.
Because you do not have to change your entire recipe, you have to find a way to adjust it better. If it tastes too spicy, you put in less garlic and pepper. Or perhaps it was not the proper time when you inserted the milk, as you got into a passionate state of mind that was not there yet for the other person: the dough falls down faster than expected.
Asking the question of how it was possible to move from a sad state to a happier one, one friend of mine gave this accurate point of view: “I think that we can move from sadness to happiness by finding the ingredient missing (or too big a quantity of an ingredient) and then be courageous enough to take it away or add the ingredient we think is missing…the difficult task is to find what has to be taken away and what added… Happiness to sadness would be to realise that the recipe was wrong…” So find a nice measurement is like detecting your own tempo; the personal rhythm has to be considered.
Let us give another comparison. To measure the intense aromatic persistence of the wine in the mouth in seconds, the name “caudalie” was used to refer to this precious moment of the expression and flavours that develop, and these are estimated in a number of “caudalies”. I say that it “was” used, because it is regretfully disappearing from French dictionaries. Experts on wine tasting judge some of the best Sauternes as counting up to 25 caudalies, meaning 25 incredible seconds of sense effervescence.

I found interesting this particular measure proper to wine because we feel kind of the same persistence with a painful feeling or marvellous one that is in fact non-describable. It would be interesting to create a measurement related to the intensity of emotions. We can wonder then, as we need a level of protein, carbohydrate, lipid and vitamin to maintain nutrition and energy, whether we perhaps need a certain level of love and motivation to balance and come near happiness, if these are seen as a nutritive aim. At the end, proportions are something we fix up in order to create homogeneity between the ingredients. Our emotions are felt as positive or negative depending on the level of satisfaction we have fixed up before. Sometimes we certainly establish this level higher than what is honestly possible to get. We are generally too much unsatisfied and it is a real work to learn to become satisfied from small pleasures; it is getting a chance to whatever tiny joy we meet often.